Blockchain Simulation Module

Most explanations of a blockchain use diagrams. This one lets you interact with it: type into a block, watch its hash change, mine it until it becomes valid, then alter an earlier block and see every block after it turn red instantly.

Why it is taught this way

Law students arrive from a humanities background. A lecture leaves them able to repeat that a ledger is immutable, and unable to say what that costs, what it does not protect against, or what happens when the majority of participants disagree. None of those are hard questions once you have a working mental model of the mechanism. All of them are unanswerable without one.

Having tampered with a block and watched the chain reject it, a student stops treating immutability as a slogan and starts treating it as a property with trade-offs. That is the point at which the legal questions become teachable.

How it is used in class

Students simulate transactions in settings they will actually meet – a real estate transfer, a maritime shipment – and are then asked where the mechanism genuinely improves on a conventional contract and where it merely relocates the problem. The tool answers the first half of that question. The second half is the lawyer’s.

Credit

This module is adapted for teaching from the open-source blockchain demonstration built by Anders Brownworth, used under the MIT licence.